t of
terror--it seemed ominous and forbidding. She found herself shrinking
away and gripping herself lest they should perceive. She could not help
but think that in most other things they were as different from her as
in color. She groped for new ways to teach colored brains and marshal
colored thoughts and the result was puzzling both to teacher and
student. With the other teachers she had little commerce. They were in
no sense her sort of folk. Miss Smith represented the older New England
of her parents--honest, inscrutable, determined, with a conscience which
she worshipped, and utterly unselfish. She appealed to Miss Taylor's
ruddier and daintier vision but dimly and distantly as some memory of
the past. The other teachers were indistinct personalities, always very
busy and very tired, and talking "school-room" with their meals. Miss
Taylor was soon starving for human companionship, for the lighter
touches of life and some of its warmth and laughter. She wanted a glance
of the new books and periodicals and talk of great philanthropies and
reforms. She felt out of the world, shut in and mentally anaemic; great
as the "Negro Problem" might be as a world problem, it looked sordid and
small at close range. So for the hundredth time she was thinking today,
as she walked alone up the lane back of the barn, and then slowly down
through the bottoms. She paused a moment and nodded to the two boys at
work in a young cotton field.

"Cotton!"

She paused. She remembered with what interest she had always read of
this little thread of the world. She had almost forgotten that it was
here within touch and sight. For a moment something of the vision of
Cotton was mirrored in her mind. The glimmering sea of delicate leaves
whispered and murmured before her, stretching away to the Northward.
She remembered that beyond this little world it stretched on and on--how
far she did not know--but on and on in a great trembling sea, and the
foam of its mighty waters would one time flood the ends of the earth.

She glimpsed all this with parted lips, and then sighed impatiently.
There might be a bit of poetry here and there, but most of this place
was such desperate prose.

She glanced absently at the boys.

One was Bles Alwyn, a tall black lad. (Bles, she mused,--now who would
think of naming a boy "Blessed," save these incomprehensible creatures!)
Her regard shifted to the green stalks and leaves again, and she started
to move away. The